Transportation planning systems and methods may attempt to minimize transportation costs through actions like load consolidation, continuous moves, selecting carriage mode, selecting carrier, and so on. Transportation planning systems and methods may also attempt to improve situations like on-time delivery, customer satisfaction, compliance with routing guides, usage of preferred carriers, usage of volume-based pricing, and so on. At times these may produce conflicting and/or competing goals. Thus, transportation planning systems and methods may be configured to selectively make trade-offs in order to maximize, for example, an overall utility.
Transportation planning generally concerns determining how and when to ship items from sources to destinations. As used herein, transportation planning concerns determining how and when to ship items using vehicles (e.g., trucks) that may have a leave-behind and/or pickup capability (e.g., drop trailer arrangement) available at a location. While trucks are primarily described, it is to be appreciated that vehicles like roll-on roll-off airplanes, roll-on roll-off ships, trains, and the like may also have leave-behind and/or pickup capability.
A leave-behind and/or pickup capability like a drop-trailer arrangement is contrasted with a live (un)load situation. In a live (un)load situation, a driver stops and waits while his truck is (un)loaded. In a drop trailer arrangement, a driver delivers a trailer, unhooks it, and may hook up and leave with another trailer. Thus, the driver does not wait while the trailer is (un)loaded. Similarly, in some cases, a train may deliver a train car, be uncoupled from it and coupled to another without waiting for the car to be (un)loaded. Likewise, in some cases, a plane may deliver a first container, pick up a second container and take off with the second container rather than waiting around for the first container to be (un)loaded. Similarly, a ship may deliver a container, and receive another container without waiting for the container to be unloaded and reloaded.
To illustrate how a drop trailer arrangement may work, consider a facility that has a drop trailer arrangement with a specific carrier for a specific type of equipment (e.g., trailer). Due to the drop trailer arrangement, the facility may develop a “pool” of vehicles (e.g., trailers) of the specific type belonging to the specific carrier. Trailers in the pool may be in different states like loaded, unloaded, awaiting pickup, and so on.
With the pool of trailers available at the facility, a certain flexibility may be applied to delivering (un)loaded trailers to the facility and/or to picking up (un)loaded trailers from the facility. The flexibility may derive from only requiring the time/space/personnel to (un)hook a trailer(s) rather than requiring the time/space/personnel to dock and (un)load a trailer(s).
Consider a multi-stop load where a truck and trailer are loaded at a source location with a set of shipments. The truck and trailer may travel to a first location, wait while a first shipment is unloaded, may continue to a second location, wait while a second shipment is unloaded, and may then arrive at a third location where the carrier and the facility have a drop trailer arrangement for this type of trailer. Rather than wait while the third shipment is unloaded, the trailer may be unhooked and left for later unloading. Additionally, another trailer, either empty or loaded, may be available for the truck to hook up and drive away. When there is a pickup for each drop off the size of the pool of trailers may remain substantially constant and act as a buffer that may relieve time pressures associated with live (un)loading. Also, having a pool of trailers may facilitate improving dock worker utilization at a facility by facilitating a steady workflow from the pool rather than a hit or miss workflow common in non-buffered situations.
Note that in a multi-stop load like that described above, the load is typically arranged so that the facility with the drop trailer arrangement is visited last.
Unique elements of the North American regional transportation system lead to extensive truck utilization. The unique elements include long distances between major cities, an extensive high quality, government subsidized road network, relatively low fuel costs, a highly organized and competitive trucking industry, comparatively poor rail service over a relatively limited rail network, and a high level of economic activity over very dense traffic lanes. Thus, systems and methods that participate in truck based transportation planning may facilitate mitigating some inefficiencies associated with truck utilization.